Diary of A Punekar’s Job Hunt…

So I was hunting jobs this past week, and like a good job-hunter, I visited Naukri, Monster, something called Indeed.co.in, and of course LinkedIn.

Right up front, I must admit I was impressed with the way Naukri presents all the info a job seeker might want – the interface is neat, clean, and maha organised.

Monster was a bit cluttered for my taste with too many variables and clicks right up front, but they focus on Top Employers, which I guess must matter to job seekers. Monster is a decent site for browsing jobs for Pune if they get the user experience improved just a bit.

Indeed is an interesting site; it provides most of the info you need at a first glance, but with an added break-up: Full-time, Part-Time, Fresher, Internship, and so on. This is a good idea, because it allows me to consider my employment requirements and search further by that specific criteria apart from other standard criteria. Their interface is trying to be clean, but needs a lot of good design work. The ‘IT jobs in Pune’ search threw up 16,612 jobs (the highest on that day compared to the other sites), so I looked the Indeed company up and apparently they are the #1 job site in the worldwide (according to their website that is).

LinkedIn is, well, classy from a design sense, but as a job seeker’s heaven, it has a long way to go. The IT jobs in Pune search threw up 2,357 jobs, which was the lowest number of jobs among the four sites. There could be an argument about quality of jobs if we delve further into the job postings, but keeping it real at the first impression of job seeking, it needs more postings from Pune.

Overall, what’s common for the purposes of discussion is that the trends from all four sites is similar. (For the purposes of this column, the charts are based on the figures from one job search site).

If you look at the number of new job postings in the Report on Hiring Activity in India (from Naukri, it seems that Pune is generating a fair amount of jobs every month in comparison to the metros. Which, in general, should mean that there’s opportunity around. Whether that’s enough, well, we need more data to figure that out.

What’s interesting in the numbers all the searches threw up was that in technology-enabled sectors, IT still has the largest number of jobs on offer in Pune (as compared to say ITES, eLearning, digital marketing and so on).

Why am I writing about jobs this week? Well, most of the conversations I have been having with people over the past few months have been about job-change, new opportunities, lack of upward mobility, job profiles and lack of adequate talent. Company managers and owners lament the lack of adequate skills and lack of adequate numbers with skills, while individuals are grappling with lack of suitable opportunities. Everyone has a job, but it’s not ‘the one’.

So I figured let’s see what the jobs data looks like on the ground, which is from the job-search sites.

A thinker, writer, and mountain-walker, Sanjay Mukherjee is a Pune-based business consultant. He is currently Chief Strategic Advisor for the Hong Kong-based learning technology company, Peak Pacific Limited).